Dead Oceans in the Deep of Middle Age

I grew up on the beaches of Southern California, but I was never a surfer. I never had enough coordination or confidence or cool to even try. But I did body surf, and there was just something about that shock of cold transforming into a manageable warmth and the salt needles poking at my eyes that felt electric. I’d bounce in swells and wait for a wave to form, and I’d swim with it, and every once in a while, I’d catch it, and it would just drive me forward, and my volition would stop as the wave’s energy took over.  

This is a metaphor and not a particularly original one at that. 

For years, it’s how writing felt to me. I would just swim out, and the words would arrive and propel me. It was gratifying, which is why I’ve done it basically non-stop since I was sixteen. I built towers out of the reams of really shitty writing, and then sometimes the stories would work, which gave me the confidence to try the novel and all the rest. 

But, as the metaphor dictates, the waters have stilled. The flash of ice water on the skin stays frigid. The swells don’t crest. The push of the wave, if it ever materializes, gives up before it can move me very far.

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A writer friend described me as a cockroach: “Cockroaches will still be here when everything else smokes in ruins!” she texted me once. Meaning, I am relentless and impervious. For years, I’d write early in the morning and for hours on the weekends, investing hours in quixotic efforts to learn the craft, one creaky scene at a time.

We lived in Cleveland at the time. About that town, the jokes come easy. It's a little scrawny kid on the playground. Feel free to bully it. I often do. But I’ve never been anywhere like it in terms of its ability to create real community and connection.

For nearly 20 years, I belonged to writing groups there. Twice a month, I’d read still-forming work, and I’d hear their thoughts about mine. I didn't necessarily need the groups for motivation to write because, again, these waves kept coming. But they did offer an ecosystem that allowed me to weather the rejections and imagine the next project, the next wave forming out in the distance where the horizon does not bend.

It would be easy to blame my recent five years in California for my presently dying ocean. It’s the sun that kills the friction like it’s bacteria. There’s something to that excuse. But mostly, I think I’m the one who has stilled the waters. 

I want to chase the waves. I really do. But on too many days, the water feels thick as tar, and the point of it all is harder to name. This many years in, I can’t help but dread finishing a novel because the humiliation rituals are so taxing and depleting. As soon as the manuscript is ready, the performance begins: I must query the agents with a pithy, purposeful logline. I must research the comps (the books I haven’t read because I have a job and a family and shows to watch with my wife with her feet on my lap). I must submit to the process (submit is the accurate word: it’s all vulnerability and exposure, lying prone, wrists and feet bound to the bedposts), and then the whole process almost always ends in silence. 

Write the book. Watch it wither.

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I wonder almost nightly whether we live too long these days. I wonder whether part of what makes deep middle age so thick and weighty is that so much has run its course and yet there are still more years to fill, broken into ever smaller units of measure, mornings, lunches, weekends.

I know that someday, maybe sooner than I can imagine, this burden will feel like a gift unopened. We’re cul-de-sacced when it comes to using time how our future hospiced selves would beseech us to.

So it goes. 

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But I then watch our daughters, who are both creatives. One is pursuing acting in Los Angeles and is driven by full-throated, wide-eyed ambition. She's booking projects already. Our other daughter lives in Chicago. She's an incredible singer and songwriter. When her inspiration comes, she’s dogged. She pursues it, and she converts it into sounds and words that she writes down, sings, and performs.

These two are doing all of that because they want it. They feel the wave before it even forms. 

I have stories I want to tell because when I submit to telling them, I’m rewarded. Sometimes, the reward is the calm I finally feel because I said the thing or the smirk I give myself for finding the right word. I laugh at my own jokes. I author glowing reviews of my stories.  

Sometimes, my stories find a small place in the world. I've published a bunch of them. And each time I do, it is like a call-and-response from the universe. I hear a ping when I get the email alerting me that my story made it through the gauntlet, and then usually I won't hear from the editor again until a thick manila envelope drops through the mail slot, and there it is: the literary journal few will ever see, let alone open, let alone read. 

Look at that. That's the beginning, middle, and end of it. And I do see each of these moments as a wild success.

But it’s a ping. Not a parade. 

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I suppose the point is that the making of things is the antidote to the impulse to just float in the vast oceans that will outlive us all. 

Some people like to float. I don't want to float. I want to be pushed, but to do that, I have to swim out to where the waters aren’t calm. And if that doesn’t work, I have to fake it. I have to generate the waves myself.

This is where metaphor loses its touch. What does that even mean? I think it means I have to choose to create even when the act feels loathsome and lonesome and exhausting and pointless. 

It’s said that the creative act is the only tool we've ever invented that allows for immortality. It’s said that the dead whisper in your ear when you read their words. I want that, for sure. I would love for someone, after I'm gone, to read my story and be like, “That's a good story.”

But I think mostly now it's just about living. 

The water in the waves has been the same since the world melted. We don’t catch waves. Waves catch the temporary us. 

The waves whisper in my ear: Get in the water. Swim out. 

It’s a choice to listen, but it’s not a choice to hear.